When I was young, I was convinced that in later life, I’d live in Liverpool and have a season ticket for Anfield. As a boy, my Dad would take me to games, but money being tight, it was nowhere near as often as I wanted to go. When I’m grown up, I told myself again and again, getting a season ticket will be my ultimate goal. In some ways, maybe it still is a goal. But in the last few years, my pilgrimages to Anfield have been ever less frequent, I have a Sky and BT subscription and listen to the dwindling number of non-televised Liverpool games on the club website. I care as much as I ever did about the team’s results. But I am, in pretty much every sense, now an armchair football fan.
Being not just an armchair fan but a Liverpool football fan who was not born in the city invites inevitable criticism. For one thing, I’m by no means alone. Liverpool’s global fanbase is huge and its UK ‘supporters’ can be found in every town and city – a good number of those rarely if ever ‘go the game’. (Part of that is because it’s bloody hard to get tickets for a ground that sells out out all the time, but still.) The ‘glory hunter’ jibes are never far away. Why does someone like me, born in West Yorkshire, support Liverpool FC anyway?
There is at least a simple answer to that. I support Liverpool because my Dad did. He was Irish, had spent time in the city and had a lot of time for Liverpudlians and LFC as a club. Many Irish people have a strong affection for Liverpool or Manchester United. While he was more of a rugby fan, hmy Dad strongly encouraged me to support Liverpool – even if he then spent every game playing “devil’s advocate” against them to annoy me (he was like that). We had some great days out at Anfield and everything about it felt special to me as a boy.
I had no idea when I first supported Liverpool – cheering them to defeat on my Gran’s telly in the 1971 FA Cup Final – that they were about to embark on an era of unprecedented success. There is no question that such success attracts new fans, but I definitively wasn’t one of them. I knew nothing at all about football when I inherited Liverpool as my team. Some might say that is still the case, but those visits to Anfield fed an obsession that I have never been able to shake. It became part of my identity from a young age and I sometimes wish I didn’t care so much about a silly game now played by a team of millionaires from all over the world. There is little point in calling me out on it: for me, it just is.
Why didn’t I support my local team? I did, sometimes – but watching Halifax at The Shay was a radically different experience. I found myself not caring that much about the result – which was usually a defeat – and distracted by what might be going on at Anfield. In some eyes, that might make me even more of a glory hunter: looking to the glamour (well, sort of) of what was then the First Division, rather than mustering enthusiasm for the local club. But what you feel is what you feel.
When I went to Anfield, to quote Roy Evans, I loved the bones of the place. I loved the green of the pitch, the jokes on the Kop, the camaraderie of the whole experience. We had to travel through Manchester to get there, which led to some unpleasant exchanges on occasion, but for whatever reason, Anfield felt like part of me from my very first visit. I liked the whole ethos of the club – the socialism of Bill Shankly that became a playing style and a whole philosophy. That may feel long gone in an era when corrupt states are buying Premier League clubs, but it’s not entirely.
If Liverpool is sold to such an enterprise, there are plenty fans who will walk away – shiny new players aren’t the most important thing in the world to many of us. In fact, social media increasingly plays out this conflict to people who go to games regularly and those who watch on TV, with the latter far more relaxed about a potentially dubious takeover if it means a huge transfer budget. The fan group Spirit of Shankly calling on the Premier League to act to stop unsuitable takeovers has infuriated some Twitter fans with weird dreams of a human right abusing state at the helm – but most of them have never been to Anfield.
So here am I, a semi if not entirely retired attendee, lecturing fellow armchair fans on the future of Liverpool FC. But as with the World Cup, we need to recognise that football is just a game; human lives matter way more then who wins the league. My sense is that most Anfield regulars – having been through tragedies and injustices of their own – still do.
So look, I totally understand criticism of armchair fans. I’d much rather go to games than watch on telly. But it is easy to overlook how a football team can become part of your identity from a very young age – I’d venture to suggest that might even be true of people who have never been to a live match (though I think they are severely missing out – and my own experience of going was what really stuck with me). The bottom line is that I don’t care what other people think, the fortunes of a football club several miles away from where I now live continue to matter hugely and deeply to me. It’s not something I can turn off, though I often wish it was.
Watching on TV is a different experience. You get replays of almost every moment, you get sometimes inane hype and hysteria from pundits and you get weird cut-aways to Jurgen Klopp or someone in the crowd so you don’t know what is happening on the pitch. You get often lazy comments from people who don’t watch your team every week. In the modern era, you get VAR – you can make up your own mind while Peter Walton agrees with the referee. VAR really belongs in a box with the proposed European Super League, expanded World Cups and Champions Leagues and £100 million transfer fees as an encapsulation of what modern football has become: a TV spectacle, funded through broadcasters for armchair viewers. Fans who actually go to the game are treated appallingly, whether it’s ludicrous kick off times, long waits for VAR decisions they have no clue about or World Cups hosted by people who won’t welcome many of their number.
Football is a remarkable and brilliant game: it’s little surprise it has such a huge place in the culture of nearly every country. But since the 1990s, that has been monetised in a way that has seen the ‘real’ fans who go to matches sacrificed for global TV viewers. Huge revenues have led to huge salaries and moved those playing the game further and further from those paying to watch. Yes, I can pay a monthly subscription and watch probably 80% of Liverpool games from my armchair – and yes, given Anfield is pretty much always over-subscribed and millions actually want to watch the match, this makes commercial sense. But it should never have come at such cost to those who follow their teams home and away; supporters are way more than a backdrop for a TV extravaganza.
So I’m in many ways a reluctant armchair fan, and about to join the waiting list again for a season ticket at Anfield (I gave up last time, but the stadium is being extended) – but an armchair fan I am. I do think people who actually go to games should have more of a say in how their club is run than I should. I do sympathise with some of the tropes about glory hunters – though the ‘support your local team’ one is a tad tiresome: at the end of the day, people will like what they like. Global fanbases pour money in to big clubs, for good or ill, and care about the results – and many of them will rarely if ever have the opportunity to go to live games. Nobody can stop them caring, or having opinions or declaring themselves a fan of something that is far removed from their daily lives.
Maybe that’s the difference – I was once a supporter, I’m now a fan. But no-one, least of all me, can stop the damn club mattering hugely to me – or longing to be there every time I tune in on TV.
Rory writes 